Pele was football’s first truly global superstar. A goalscorer supreme, but also the architect of some of the most ingenious skills the world has ever seen. A diminutive forward with the most extraordinary ability in the air. He was the most complete player you could imagine.
The International Olympic Committee decreed him the greatest athlete of the 20th Century, and Time magazine had him on their list of the 100 most important people of the century. This was a man who transcended sport.
He stopped a war, and was a humanitarian. He had Brazil and the world alike in thrall. The only player ever to win three World Cups, his legacy is felt and discussed every time the little gold trophy is contested.
Pele, the man who was every footballer’s favourite footballer during his golden career, died a year ago today at the age of 82. There will never be another human being like him.
Born Edson Arantes do Nascimento on October 23, 1940, he was nicknamed Pele during his schooldays due to his unusual pronunciation of Bile, the goalkeeper of local club Vasco da Gama. As a kid he played a lot of futsal, and the game’s lightning pace demanded a quick brain. That speed of thought would become a valuable piece of his armoury as he tore up record books from the beginning of his professional career right to its very end 21 years later.
Having made a goalscoring debut for Santos at 15, he was a Brazil international inside a year, again finding the net in a 2-1 defeat to Argentina. Less than 12 months on from that, he became the World Cup’s youngest ever player after bouncing back from a knee injury to play against USSR in the 1958 finals in Sweden. After netting the winner in the quarter-final against Wales, he stuck a hat-trick past France in the last four.
In the final he scored twice, the first of which will forever remain iconic. Receiving a cross from Nilton Santos, Pele chested the ball around a challenge from Sigge Parling into a space which gave Bengt Gustavsson the chance to get a foot in. But as the defender’s ball-and-all high tackle came in, Pele was already moving out of the way having quickly lofted the ball 10 feet up over Gustavsson’s head, allowing him to volley home with the kind of technique which at the time was considered little short of stunning.
The 17-year-old was in tears at full-time, shortly after netting his second goal to round off a 5-2 win. The sight of him being lifted aloft by Nilton Santos is probably the image of the tournament.
Four years later he arrived at the finals in Chile as the greatest player in the sport despite still only being 21. In Brazil’s opening match he tore apart Mexico with a display variously described as mesmeric, dominant and otherworldly. He teed up Mario Zagallo with a magnificent chip-shot of a cross from the right side for the Selecao’s opener, then he scored a goal best articulated as being Diego Maradona’s goal against England 24 years before Diego Maradona’s goal against England.
Picking up the ball 35 yards out on the right touchline, Pele surveyed the scene in front of him, waited for a challenge to come in, then chipped the ball around one tackler and ran right around the side of another. Two touches later, he’d taken out two more defenders and made it to the edge of the box, and as he began to lose his balance with two further Mexicans ready to pounce he made a slight correction with his right foot and then in the same motion slammed home with his left as he fell. Utter brilliance.
It was the World Cup’s great loss that he would get injured in the next Group 3 game against Czechoslovakia and miss the rest of the tournament. Brazil managed to win the trophy without him though, meaning he collected a second winner’s medal.
In 1966 Pele was hacked out of the competition by Bulgarian and Portuguese defenders as Brazil crashed out at the group stage. Besides England’s victory, the travails of the great number 10 are the first detail anyone will recite about that summer. He was back on the winner’s podium in Mexico in ’70, though, playing in arguably the greatest international team of all time.
He scored four goals in that tournament, including one in the 4-1 final victory over Italy with a trademark leaping header which saw him hang in the air for an impossibly long time. The defender he beat to the ball, Tarcisio Burgnich, later said of Pele: “I told myself before the game ‘He’s made of skin and bones just like everyone else.’ But I was wrong.”
Burgnich’s comments were typical of the way contemporaries spoke of Pele all the time. “Pele was the only footballer who surpassed the boundaries of logic,” said the late, great Johan Cruyff.
He had become such a massive name that his club side Santos had taken to going on world tours, and everywhere Pele went, crowds flocked. In 1969 he even managed to bring a war to a standstill. With Santos visiting Lagos during the Nigerian Civil War it was agreed that there would be a 48-hour ceasefire so that the nation’s attentions could be focused on Pele.
Five years later he left Santos after 19 hugely successful seasons to join New York Cosmos in the North American Soccer League. There he transformed the face of the entire country’s football, multiplying crowds both home and away. “Pele was bigger than the Pope,” said Cosmos founder Steve Ross. “Wherever he went it was like Beatlemania. Muhammad Ali, Robert Redford, Mick Jagger, Elton John… everyone was in awe of Pele.”
And everyone remained in awe of him until the day he died. There may have been claims to his throne during the modern era, with footage of present-day stars far more easily available compared to in Pele’s day, but nobody is ever likely to have the same transformative effect on the sport that the brilliant Brazilian did.
Football’s first superstar, and perhaps still its biggest ever, Pele was one of a kind. As the late Nelson Mandela said of the Brazilian: "To watch him play was to watch the delight of a child combined with the extraordinary grace of a man in full."
